GLAMOut: Group Sharing of GLAM-Wiki Experiences

One of the hardest parts of working in the global community that contributes to Wikipedia, is that we have millions of content pages and thousands of contributors working on hundreds of different activities with hundreds of different approaches all the time. Global reach means global participation, and a more than overwhelming number of possible ways to intervene and different approaches to contributing (I talk about this diversity in an earlier blog post). One of the ways in which we create a more unified sense of community is through community communications. We have a number of different communications venues, from the English Wikipedia’s community newspaper (the Wikipedia Signpost), to the Wikimedia Foundation Blog (http://blog.wikimedia.org/) to Planet Wikimedia (an RSS aggregation of blogs like mine at http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/).

GLAM-Wiki Communications

For the GLAM-Wiki community (unaware of that term? Check out my previous post explaining GLAM-Wiki), the growing popularity of collaborations around the world makes it almost impossible to keep up. For this reason, globally, we have a GLAM-Wiki newsletter on Outreach Wiki which allows us to share reports about activities. However, textual documents often get overlooked in a world where we get a barrage of blogs, texts, tweets, emails and other activities. Also reporting through documentation can be hard, and spotty at times, because we all do a number of different and time consuming activities that don’t require active writing. To supplement this written venue of communication, as of this spring, the United States GLAM-Wiki consortium has been doing a series of Google Hangouts, called GLAMOuts, to communicate some of the major initiatives happening in the United States and post it in another public format online (YouTube video). The format is pretty simple: participants for the hangouts self select through a call for participants on the homepage for GLAMouts and an email list amongst US GLAM-Wiki participants; and the participants show up during an hour block to talk for 5, 10 or 15 minutes about what they are doing and why. These GLAMouts allow the U.S. GLAM-Wiki community to create a cohesion and energy within our activities, sharing best practices and knowledge.

September GLAMOut

This month’s GLAMOut (available in recording on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI4x9rjhYlw&feature=youtu.be ) on Friday featured the Wikipedian in Residence at the Smithsonian Institution, the Wikipedian in Residence at the Metropolitan New York Library Council and the Wikipedia Library Initiative along with myself. All the attendees presented very innovative approaches for their projects. Though I won’t summarize all we talked about, I would like to highlight how each of the other presenters talked about work with libraries in the U.S.:

• The Metropolitan New York Library Council is working toward integrating Wikipedia into the workflow of Librarians, so as to ensure that Library resources of special significance (such as exhibits, special collections or digital resources) get used as references or foundations on Wikipedia (thus getting higher publicity). This is not entirely a new approach, Wikipedians and librarians have been talking about Wikipedia integration for a long time (take for instance this reflection on how to integrate library resources into Wikipedia, which bases its advise and reflection on this 2007 article in D-Lib Magazine). However, by systematically presenting to and conversing with a number of the libraries in New York City, they have built a very comprehensive “How to” guide in a LibGuide, a format many librarians are used to. 
• Dominic McDevitt-Parks, the Wikipedian in residence at the Smithsonian Institution, is also talking to a group of libraries in Boston, Massachusetts to create a across the city series of Massachussetts History editing events during Open Access Week (October 21 – 27).
• The Wikipedia Library Project is negotiating with big (often pay-walled) publishers and university libraries to allow Wikipedians free access to their research materials in order to improve Wikipedia (for more information about the resources and the effort check out the homepage for the project).

All these projects actively work to better integrate access to academic knowledge and resources into the Wikimedia community in order to improve public access and awareness of those materials. As I have mentioned previously on my blog, these activities and their overwhelming success hinges around the basic assumptions grounding field of knowledge management: that the best way for people to effectively find and use information is to gather it on highly visible and accessible digital platforms that allow interaction and collaboration. For these projects, the GLAM-Wiki look towards more traditional knowledge gathering organizations (libraries) and actively works to place that information in the most visible (and non-commercial) public space on the internet: Wikipedia. What an invigorating and exciting conversation! I am glad that I was part of it!

What’s Next?

It is the beginning of a new week, and the semester is already becoming very busy (9 meetings last week including the GLAMOut)! However, the Blake initiative is having lots of success both reaching out to Blake Scholars, Wikipedians and our own community at K-State. Hopefully, this week, I can write a couple more posts finishing up my conversation I started on GLAM-Wiki metrics and reporting on the Blake Archive’s impact on Wikipedia and then a more thorough blog post exploring the what, why and how efforts from different organizations both on and off Kansas States’s campus are effecting my internship.

Reporting Metrics on GLAM-Wiki Part 1

As I mentioned in a post earlier in the week, documenting and assessing the effects of a GLAM-Wiki partnership on a institutions digital presence is a critical step to GLAM-Wiki cooperations. There are a number of ways to take metrics related to Wikipedia. In this blog I am going to highlight a few and why they matter. If you would like to see a comprehensive list of tools that GLAM professionals can use to measure content on Wikipedia, check out this list of tools used by the GLAM-Wiki community.

Metrics are an important part of any project, because it allows whoever is coordinating that project to communicate to others exactly what happened. This is particularly important when working with academic or cultural institutions: their is always to much work in that space and not enough labor. Metrics allow academics and GLAM-participants to assess the ratio of effort to public impact. For this blog post, I will cover some of the most basic types of metrics used by GLAM-Wiki assessment: quality and number of articles and external links.

Blake task force and Article quality

The 1.0 Assessment chart from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blake#Article_assessment

One of the most common ways for Wikipedians to organize work and content is to create community projects where they can coordinate efforts. Projects for large swaths of material are called WikiProjects and for more specific subtopics, sometimes these WikiProjects will form task forces (check out this link for a list of WikiProjects on English Wikipedia). For this GLAM-Wiki cooperation, I created a William Blake Task force as part of WikiProject Poetry on English Wikipedia. One of the advantages of WikiProjects is that they allow users to know who is working on a content area and for participants to categorize. On Wikipedia, the community has developed an assessment system called the 1.0 assessment scheme to map out the importance and quality of articles on English Wikipedia.

When I first found out I would be doing an internship with the archive (as reported in an earlier post), I began tagging articles related to Blake within this schema. In doing so, I identified 150 pages related to Blake and his work (now 151 page because of the a new article). I assessed them according to the 1.0 criteria.  As you can see in the screenshot of the assessment graph below, many of these articles are lower in quality (starts and stubs are small starter articles on Wikipedia with little content or references while Featured articles are well referenced and thorough articles that undergo a review process) and many of the most importance articles related to Blake and his art (Blake’s biography and his main publications) could use focused improvement. By identifying these qualities, we can direct contributors that we enlist through the Education assignments, editathons and Wikipedia community content drives towards the articles that need the most work and are most important.  At the end of the internship, I will reassess how successful these activities are by documenting the changes in article quality and number.

URLs to the Institution

One of the easiest ways for an institution to report it’s reach and presence on Wikipedia, as well as the internet more generally, is to determine how many urls lead towards different parts of their website. For English Wikipedia, a contributor who works for the Library of Congress, Ed Summers, created a tool called LinkyPedia which maps out how often links get used on English Wikipedia. According to the tool, currently, the Blake Archive has 110 links to its pages across 56 Wikipedia pages (not all of them articles). This is a small number of URLs considering how important the Blake Archive is as the primary Academic source of Blake images and transcription on the web. Anyone who researches a Blake poem or publication will likely find their way to the English Wikipedia article on the topic, and, if links to the authoritative Archive records are not available, they may not realize that the archive exists or can provide them support. This is a problem for students, researchers and Blake scholarship more generally: the free authoritative materials from the Blake Archive can easily be ignored for someone unfamiliar with the project. Adding links that meaningfully help readers connect to this outside source, as long as its not simply link spam, fulfills both Wikipedia’s mission of helping individuals access free knowledge and the Blake Archive’s mission in increasing use of their reference resources produced through almost two decades of institutional funding and grants.

Links on other Wikimedia projects are also important. For the Blake Archive, the most important links will be from Wikimedia Commons. Because the high resolution scans from the Blake Archive have been available for free on the internet since 1996, Wikimedia contributors have been downloading the images and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons because of their public domain status. Many of these images have been accompanied with a URL that provides the source of these images, properly accrediting the Archive for making them available. Though the MediaWiki software allows searching for the use of URLs, the report it generates doesn’t account for multiple URLs on a page thus allowing you to count the number of pages. To create a data similar to Linkypedia’s I ran two different tools to create metrics for links on Wikimedia Commons: first, running the built in tool, I discovered that their are 710 links to the Blake Archive; next, using the tool AutoWikiBrowser, I ran another report which reported 644 distinct file pages using those urls. On Wikimedia Commons, their are 2287 images related to William Blake, thus the report suggests that the Blake Archive is the source of over 1/4 of Blake images already in use across Wikimedia Projects. Already, in my initial survey of those images, I have discovered other Blake Archive scans without proper metadata attributing their source; this suggests that a significantly larger portion of those images are from the Blake Archive.

These metrics about link data have allowed me prioritize a particular activity that should improve my internship’s public impact: adding appropriate links and metadata to English Wikipedia and Commons. By adding links to the William Blake Archive and the institutional webpages of those institutions that hold the physical Blake objects, images will be accredited to their producers and readers will be affiliated with direct channels to free academic sources.

Coming soon

In my next blog post (or two), I will talk about the tools available for tracking page views, use of images on the family of Wikimedia projects, and how the Archive’s website metrics can be compared to Wikimedia projects to help improve public access to the materials.

Meanwhile, I would like to encourage everyone interested in William Blake or GLAM-Wiki to help improve content related to Blake on English Wikipedia. For things to do, check out the list of potential projects at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blake#To_do . If you need help learning how to edit, check out http://editathon.org/ .